The hydrocarbon materials include coal, oil shale, biomass, oil sand, municipal solid waste and industrial by-product such as absorbent particles with absorbed organic matters and the like, and they are suitable for extracting high-value chemicals to realize its high-value utilization because of its rich contents of organic components. Carbonization is an effective method to extract high-value oil products from solid hydrocarbon materials, wherein the produced liquid-phase products could be used as the alternative to fuel oil and also contain abundant raw chemicals such as benzene, toluene, xylene, phenol, cresol and xylenol, etc. and thus present important application value. The methods for heat and mass transfer in carbonization process significantly affect the final utilization efficiency of materials and compositions of end products, and are the main technical means of regulating the carbonization process.
At present, the carbonization technologies are divided into two classes of underground and aboveground retorting. The present underground retorting has not been widely used in industry since it is difficult to control the process and it will easily lead to the underground oil and gas pollutions. The aboveground retorting refers to a process of crushing and screening the hydrocarbon materials to desired particle size, and then heating the particles in different retorts to produce different pyrolysis products. According to different heating methods, the aboveground retorting techniques can be classified into indirect heating and direct heating. Indirect heating retort refers to a method of transferring the required heat for carbonization into the retorting chamber via the reactor wall, which has very low heat efficiency and is also hard to scale up, so that this method is seldom applied in industrial production. The direct heating retort is called as internal heating retort and can be classified into gas heat carrier and solid heat carrier according to different heat carriers, of which the heat sources are generally from the combustion of pyrolysis gas or solid products. Taking oil shale pyrolysis technology as an example, different types of carbonization furnace are adapted in gas heat carrier pyrolysis technologies, wherein the representative techniques include Petrosix technology in Brazil, Kiviter technology in Estonia, SGR pyrolysis technology of the Union Oil Company in USA, Joesco pyrolysis technology in Japan and Fushun retorting technology in China, etc. The solid heat carrier pyrolysis technologies include Tosco-II pyrolysis technology in USA, Galoter technology in Estonia, LR technology in Germany, ATP technology in Canada and pyrolysis technology developed by Dalian University of Technology (DG Process) in China. Although there has been a variety of pyrolysis technologies adapted for different hydrocarbon materials and some of them are even applied to industry, they still suffer from various problems in the operation process. As for gas heat carrier pyrolysis technologies, the key issue is that the utilization efficiency of materials and heat efficiency of apparatus are low and only solid materials in block can be processed. And as for solid heat carrier pyrolysis technologies, problems lie in huge equipment, complex structure, large power consumption, and low yield in pyrolysis oil, etc. Meanwhile, the above-mentioned carbonization processes have a common problem that the produced oils have high contents of dust and heavy components, which will directly affect the continuous operation of apparatus and subsequent processing of products.
In order to solve the problem that oils obtained from the prior pyrolysis methods have high contents of dust and heavy components, it is necessary to design anew reactor and method. Only in this way, it is possible to provide a new way for solving the energy issue.